The myths have connections with all aspects of human life and experience: they refer to the origins and the nature of the universe, the gods and mankind; they claim to reveal historical facts or may describe psychological truths; they make emotional valuations and concern themselves with moral, physical or ontological issues; they may convey beliefs, superstitions, rituals, literary images, social ideas, and they may use symbols and allegories as well as reason, philosophy and ethical values.
As the myths then may be said to comprise both the outer and the inner world in all their aspects, they appear as an all-embracing tale, which originally was transmitted by the flexible instrument and primeval art of story-telling. However, this tale cannot be arbitrarily invented by a myth-maker, for if it were believed to be the product of gratuitous fantasy it could not claim to be true and it would then be called at best fiction, but not myth. And yet the myths, as we shall soon see, are entitled to tell lies without abdicating truth.
The reduction of a knowledge of the truth to a purely theoretical kind of evidence from which all living, personal, and ethical decisions have been carefully excluded entails such a palpable narrowing of the field of truth that it is already robbed of its universality and thus of its own proper essence. If truth and goodness are both really transcendental properties of being, then both must interpenetrate each other and every exclusive juxtaposition of their respective realms can only lead to a distort ion of their mutual essence. Correspondingly, the same also goes for the last transcendental property of being, that of beauty; she too makes a claim staked on her universal validity; she too can never be separated from her two sisters. And so the quite..........
